I opened our phone conversation with a disclaimer: I was contacting him about the “mpreg” incarnation—a fan-made portrait of Clippy depicting the paperclip as a male with a bulging pregnant belly—and his priceless reaction on Twitter.

Atteberry laughed, to my relief. I had not yet offended the maker of one of the deepest-ingrained digital characters of my own childhood. “It’s important to me that people remember Clippy because as long as they do, I have cachet,” he said.

The tone properly set to “as weird as it gets,” we talked about what it’s like to be the man behind the most annoying assistant in the history of computing, and why people insist on getting freaky about it.